Today's blog post comes to you from Jonathan Hyland, Client Relationship Director at iCIMS and an emerging thought-leader in his own right within the human capital management industry. You can follow him on Twitter at @JHyland_iCIMS.
In 2009, the term ‘price conscious’ took on a new meaning: ‘price paranoid’. Beyond looking for a great deal, consumers and businesses alike wanted what they needed, when they needed it, and at the lowest cost to them. In another phrase: they needed something of value at a low price. Here’s how these buyers are thinking: price = value.
The ‘price = value’ equation will get you far when it comes to food and clothing, but when it comes to purchasing a tool that will drive critical business processes, it doesn’t. Certain business tools are cheaper than others for a good reason: less value. Whether it’s awesome requisition functionality at the expense of easy-to-use portals for your candidates, or great searching and poor usability, the ultimate ‘cost’ of the cheaper tool amounts to far more if you’d invested just a smidge more with the better tool.
Sometimes, though, it’s not even the actual tool; it’s the support that comes with it.
For example, all iCIMS clients have a dedicated Client Relationship Director, in addition to 24x5 access to our Subject Matter Experts. But iCIMS goes a step farther. We have Implementation Managers who closely work with our clients to get their iCIMS system live; and there’s also our Project Engineering team, professionals who work with clients on specific, long-term projects after implementation.
That’s right. iCIMS has four distinct departments dedicated to client service, and our clients have access to these departments at no extra cost. That’s a far cry from other companies, with tiered service agreements, no account managers, or worse, having to purchase consulting time.
Before you make a decision based solely on how much the upfront monetary cost is to you, take a step back and ask your provider the hard questions: how do you support your tool? In addition to your tool, what am I getting with it? The answers might surprise you.
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